Clause 6
NHS Redress Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
John Baron (Shadow Minister, Health; Billericay, Conservative)
The Minister must accept that his scheme, as envisaged, is a two-stage scheme anyway. According to the Secretary of State on Second Reading, the trust will first investigate the facts, then pass the case to the NHS Litigation Authority for assessment of liability. Even within the Government’s scheme, there is a two-stage process.
All we are saying is that we want a one-stage process. We want the fact-finding stage only, to ensure that lessons learned are not lost in the system and the national health service. Fault finding can be determined by the NHS Litigation Authority—that option exists—or the patient can go elsewhere to a resolve-type scheme and so on. The bottom line is that the Government scheme, as presently constituted, involves a two-stage process anyway, as confirmed by the Secretary of State on Second Reading.